Obama’s State of the Union: Two different worlds

WASHINGTON, Jan 12, 2016 — In his final State of the Union address to Congress, President George Washington said the one great accomplishment of his eight years as the nation’s chief executive—giving him “heart-felt satisfaction”—were “measures as will ascertain to our country the prospect of a speedy extinguishment of the debt.”

Tuesday evening, President Obama told Americans they are lucky to live in this, the best of all possible worlds: a no-growth economy that employs only 62.3 percent of able-bodied Americans—and falling; a middle class that for the first time in more than 40 years makes up less than half of the population; a time when the majority of Americans earn less than $30,000 a year; when nearly half of Americans under the age of 30, those instrumental to Obama’s election as president in 2008, say “the American Dream” is dead; a time when America’s destitute saw their household net worth decline from negative $905 in 2000 to negative $6,029 today.

Obama hinted that Americans should not listen to Republican negative Nellies running for president and badmouthing his economic legacy. “Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction,” he said.

He added that assaults on his presidency’s profound economic failings are the reason that “a lot of Americans feel anxious.” You know, those saddled with $20 trillion of government debt by the time Obama steps down from office.

But Obama will have to do more than convince Republican presidential candidates that our nation’s economy is flourishing. According to the Pew Research Center, he’ll have to persuade 85 percent of “self-described middle-class adults who say it’s more difficult now than a decade ago for middle-class people to maintain their standard of living.”

You know, those Americans who toil 1,790 hours every year to the 1,420 hours of Norwegians, or the 1,479 hours of Frenchmen. Those Americans whose productivity rose by 75 percent from 1979 to 2012. Those Americans who forswore 175 million hours of vacation time last year. Those Americans whose average annual health care costs in 2005 were $2,035 but today cost $4,332 under the cruel and absurdly named “Affordable Care Act,” Obamacare.

An unnamed presidential aide told CNN that Obama “believes that it is incredibly important that Hillary Clinton succeeds him. The only way that we have an economy where people aren’t losing their health care is if Hillary Clinton becomes president.”

And there you have it.

President Obama and Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton can’t make the distinction between a prosperous free market and the government’s latest, expensive, job-killing cancerous malignancy.

If you like the dismal economic state of our union under Obama, you’ll just love what a Hillary Clinton presidency has in store for our rapidly declining banana republic.